Jason Martin

I am a photographer and artist working at the intersection of the built world and the imagination — drawn to structures, light, and color as raw material for images that reach beyond documentation toward something more fully felt.

My sensibility was shaped early by artists and filmmakers for whom constructed reality is a form of truth. Stephen Shore's ability to find the monumental in the mundane — the stillness and weight he brings to ordinary scenes through scale and color — taught me that the camera can make the world feel more itself than it ordinarily appears. Gregory Crewdson builds domestic spaces into images that carry the narrative weight of entire films. The practical effects of science fiction and fantasy cinema from the 1970s and 80s — cloud tanks, matte paintings, handmade worlds — showed me that a constructed reality can be more vivid and more affecting than the one we inhabit. And the cinematography of Tarkovsky and Wong Kar-wai, where light and composition make time feel tangible, remains a constant reference for what a still or moving image can hold.

Ambient and atmospheric music shapes my process as much as any visual influence — it is the environment I work inside.

I received my degree in fine arts from the California College of the Arts in San Francisco and Oakland, and have been creating for the past 25 years.

I live with my wife and fellow artist, Miranda Martin, in Birmingham — though our hearts and minds remain forever in California.